This book is explicitly conceived as a field intervention. In focusing on LGBTQ festivals’ conflicted temporalities and historiography, my aim was twofold: revealing the axiological coordinates and field imaginary of festival studies – exploring the debates and conventions that structure and define festival research as well as scholars’ relationship to their object of study – and, through a focus on minoritized festivals, expanding, uncutting, or reimagining the field itself.

To that end, this book is articulated around two operative concepts, each with their own relationship to the temporality of academic knowledge production. ‘Critical festival studies’ pays attention to the constitution of the field and its quest for legitimacy, revealing the disciplinary assumptions and theoretical framework that structure scholarship. ‘The festival as a method’ is largely inspired by early film studies’ productive uses of the festival format as a praxis of canon building: it mobilizes the theoretical tools of festival studies in order to rethink some of the debates that have animated the discipline. LGBTQ Film Festivals inhabits these conflicting temporalities. It does not aim at providing a general direction for future research or at reconceptualizing festival studies’ field imaginary through yet another meta-theoretical approach. Rather, this queering of festival studies testifies to the productive messiness of academic knowledge production: instead of providing definitive answers, it presents itself as a constant questioning of both our role as scholars and the effects of the institutionalization of the field.

If this book analyzes the temporalities of queer festivals, it is also clearly a product of its time, as festival studies is being simultaneously critiqued (most of the time, rightly so) and institutionalized within academic Curricula through courses and seminars that replicate its field imaginary and political project. To some extent, festival studies reflects the changing nature of universities: our willingness to market ourselves as festival scholars and to devise textbooks and syllabi on festivals testifies to the realities of both the job market and grant/institutional policies. In particular, festival scholars’ adoption of social sciences methodologies and theoretical frameworks corresponds to new guidelines in grant policies – to criteria of evaluation that seek to ‘quantify’ the ‘impact’ of research and to funding schemes that prioritize public-private partnerships. The field's focus on festivals’ relationship to ‘the industry’ exemplifies a context in which academic research is supposed to be translatable to and useful for real world economic development. Here, my position may seem paradoxical.